Gary Paulsen Quotes

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

When you are facing the wilderness on your own, you have a totally different attitude to someone who works in government or who has a monthly cheque.

If you sort of treat the environment in sort of this mechanical, industrial way that there's a disconnect between man and the environment, it's very easy to treat people that way.

The transformation of environment has become the purpose of human life; life seems real only insofar as it deals with things.

The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

I feel like a tree. A tree doesn't feel a duty to start doing something about the earth from which it comes. A tree just has to bear fruit, and leaves and blossoms. It doesn't feel grateful to the earth.

The magic of living life for me is, and always has been, the magic of living on the land, not in the magic of money.

I practically lived in the woods when I was a kid, avoiding grown-ups and my dysfunctional family, pretending I was half-wolf, a feral child who napped in nests made out of ferns, ate wild blueberries, and wove sticks and feathers into her hair.

The environment is more than just nature. The environment is peoples needs.

All true wealth is biological.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

If we don't have a planet, we don't have anything.

I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

I'm convinced that the earth is much stronger than us.

I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can't we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?

When you refer to terra entities, you ornately say Mother Nature and Mother Earth. How much honour and care do all of us accord to any of the three - including our real life mother?

I want to work on environmental issues.

We've been playing in the sandbox of creation for millions of years. We ruin one environment, we move on to the next - manifest destiny. Now it's hitting us collectively: Our mother's life is in our hands.

Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having an ax fight in the jungle clearing. Instead, we sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer.

The planet isn't going anywhere. We are.

You do your own thing and you see if you survive.

The ability to produce every necessity of life renders us independent in war as well as in peace.

We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.